In July 2016, the Kumasi Polytechnic presented the K-POLY FUFU MAMA, the latest machine promising to ease the labour-heavy preparation of Ghana’s national dish. The selected audience of fufu pounders, connoisseurs and chop bar owners present at the launch covered by TV3 is shown as enthusiastic recipients of this Ghanaian technological breakthrough. The inventors of the machine rehearse the ever-same argument: K-Poly is more hygienic, less burdensome, less noisy and more nature-friendly than the traditional pounding with mortar and pestle. And even more importantly: with K-Poly, fufu is ready in less than five minutes.

However convincing this might sound, chances are that, like its many predecessors promoted since 1975 – the Hobart mixer, the Kenwood mixer, and hammer mills – K-Poly Fufu Mama will not enter Ghanaian households at all. Prices such as US$225 for a comparable yam pounding machine can only be part of the explanation. The sophisticated palates of many fufu eaters insist that one can taste the difference. The sound of two metals rubbing against each other can never match the rhythm of topam-topam or the soft fu-fu, fu-fu sound the air makes when it escapes from the mash in the final stages of pounding. As a result, what is not prepared with mortar and pestle cannot be fufu, and the use of machines is nothing but laziness.

As long as the culinary standard remains this high, there will be competition for the machine. And Ghanaians will keep pounding, with hardening of palms, sweat dripping into the mash and all – the same way as “from time immemorial”, in the words of the Daily Graphic article announcing the new machine.

Without even going as far as the preparation of the soup that comes with it, the creation of a perfectly smooth fufu ball can take anything from the main hours of the afternoon to a couple of days, or, if fermented cassava is being used, a week. At the very least, it involves two people, the pounder standing upright, and the moderator, flipping and turning the mash of plantain, yam or cassava in the mortar in the brief moments after the pestle is lifted and before it is dropped again. In the process, all remaining lumps are meticulously taken out by hand until the ball is so soft that it can be swallowed without chewing.

Fufu is not reserved for special occasions. Before the recent rise in the price of cassava, it could be bought for GH₵1.00 at chop bars in Kumasi, an affordable price for those without the manpower to do their own pounding. More importantly, fufu is not food, it is a culinary choice. It is a passion, both in the intense excitement leading up to the meal, as well as in the enduring and suffering having gone into its preparation. It is a dish standing for the nation’s place in the world.

But maintaining such a high level of culinary sophistication on a national scale comes at a price. If it is not backed by the right kind of imperial machinery it will almost certainly earn you one of the lower ranks on the world’s GDP table. On a geopolitical scale, the World Bank is a powerful ally of those who invent pounding machines. A 2006 World Bank report, Gender, Time Use and Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, found out that “time poverty” needs to be understood as a new dimension of poverty on the continent, meaning that reproductive/ unproductive/ unpaid/ care/ domestic labour takes up too much time. What they call a culturally determined “household time overhead” is the total of things that need to be done around the house. And in their view it is configured in particularly unproductive ways in Africa. Seen from New York, what is worse is that this type of work is also unevenly distributed among men and women. Their numbers show that African women work 30 per cent more than men – and that is even though most of their activities are not even reflected in the data, because women tend to not consider what they do as “work”. In conclusion: “labour-saving domestic technology relating to food processing is likely to have a greater immediate impact in raising the productivity and reducing the time burdens of many women.”

As Yemisi Aribisala points out elsewhere in this edition, Nigerian women in fact use the labour-intensive work in the kitchen to showcase their strength over men, and they have been doing this very successfully: “Over 70 percent of our immunity to disease is sitting inside our guts at the mercy of the food we eat. SHE has license to spit in his meals or lace them with arsenic. She has him, innards and all.” Against the “gender equalising army orders” calling for the inclusion of women into the capitalist work force, she warns that the kitchen is “being falsely implicated in the diminishment of a woman’s power. This much-needed, loved and utilised room is now outrageously persona non grata.”

Accordingly, for Aribisala the preparation of fufu is a far from the drudgery and waste of time bemoaned by the World Bank. She writes:

“The mortar is the vagina, the pestle the penis… but the pounding of yam into a supple mound is at the woman’s pleasure. She decides pace, force, beginning, end, heat, coolness, yes or no. Being in that room where fires are lit is an apparel of power worn by a woman that money cannot pay for. The room yields its secrets to its owner and not to the paid drudge.”

In “The Truth about Fufu”, published in Kalahari Review, Kofi Akpabli also makes use of the sex analogy to explain why fufu is life for many enthusiasts: “When all is done, the pestle is no longer needed until the next session. Meanwhile, the end product lies in the bosom of the mortar just like a new baby issues from the woman’s womb.”

The time poverty strategy is not the first time the World Bank has intervened in the division of labour in African families to save women from using their time in unproductive ways, that is, in ways that do not necessarily produce products to be sold on the market. Three decades ago, when it identified that too much money was being invested into the African state – the national “household time overhead” – the World Bank put a lot of money into attracting women to work on the plantations for the cash crops economy.

According to Silvia Federici in A Feminist Critique of Marx, the refusal to being recruited to work on the plantation, once again, and the defence of subsistence-oriented agriculture by African women, was in turn identified by the World Bank as the main factor in the crisis of its agricultural development projects. A flood of academic papers on “women’s contribution to development” ensued, turning first into NGO-sponsored “income generating projects” and then into “microcredit lending schemes” – all aiming at integrating women into the system of paid labour.

In this light, fufu pounding is a political tool of resistance against a long tradition of Western philosophising about “taste”, stretching from Plato to Hegel to Hannah Arendt. Marked by a profound disregard for the actual taste of the tongue, it locates taste among the lower regions on the hierarchy of the senses and in opposition to the rational character of genuine, cultured, aesthetic experiences. The view that food is fuel derives from this tradition, and it is a prerequisite for how willingly industrial nations have given into the promise of fast food being just that, fast.

In his writings on labour in Capital, Marx never recognised reproductive work – such as cooking or childcare – as work per se, and instead associated it with the world of nature and instinct, like “a spider weaving a web or a bee building a honeycomb”. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith claimed that not the goodwill of the butcher or the baker provides our daily supper, but the self-interest of all economic agents involved in the process of food production. It should be mentioned that he was still living with his mother at the time. In Arendt’s influential conceptual trinity of labour, work and action, homo laborans works like a machine to meet the basic needs of life, remaining a slave and leaving the freedom to act with others and to affect change as an exclusive privilege of homo politicus. Be it the belief in the economic man or the political man, liberals, Marxists and capitalists all agree that technology will eventually pave the way to a better life, will liberate first men, and then women too, from the “burden of chores” like cooking towards more meaningful work.

Little do they know of the Ghanaian kitchen as a place where communities are created, knowledge transmitted and, perhaps most importantly, where those homines politicus who appear to make all the decisions are subordinates to the absolute power of the one who does the cooking.

According to Kofi Akpabli’s account, fufu pounding underwent several technical innovations over time. The spread of chop bars has, for example, given rise to the specialised profession of “fufu macho-men” operating with giant pestles and mortars. If the pounding is not done by a pounder and a moderator in the classic fashion also known as “Fufu-One-on-One”, it can also be done by a single person who possesses the outstanding psychomotor abilities and the mental balance to do the pounding by herself. This technique is also known as “Automated Fufu Machine”. The so-called “Pestles of Mass Destruction” technique requires a massive mortar and can involve about six people. No moderation is needed in this case.

In the latest survey on work and leisure in the high-income countries forming part of the Organisation of Economic Corporation and Development (OECD), time spent cooking or preparing food is so insignificant that it does not even feature in the statistics. People in Germany, for example, work for an average of 1,478 hours a year and have 7,282 hours of leisure, of which sleep makes up the biggest chunk, with an average of 8 hours and 22 minutes a day. Ninety-seven minutes per day are dedicated to eating.

If this “work-life-balance” is to be maintained, a diet made up of sugar cereals for breakfast, bread, spaghetti and frozen pizza makes sense. It can all be arranged in five to ten minutes. That is if one does not have the money to afford food that is prepared by someone else who does the hard work of operating a restaurant or take-out place.

Apart from the compromised quality of the food, the health hazards posed by sugar, fats, excessive wheat consumption and preservatives have all been linked to diseases ranking from schizophrenia to cancer, autism and ADHD. As a result, “bio” and organic supermarket chains are on the rise in urban centres of the West, selling rye and spelt (instead of wheat), and gluten-free, dairy-free and preservative-free products at premium prices.

As John McMurty wrote in The Cancer State of Capitalism, there is something to be learned from feminist economists working from the vantage point of the “unwaged force of women who are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage equivalent of their life-serving work is estimated at $16 trillion.”

Women have for some time seen through the false promises of capitalist or Marxist progress. Despite washing machines and dish washers, mixers, blenders and microwaves, nappies still need to be changed, rooms need to be cleaned, the young, weak and old ones need to be taken care of – that is if one does not opt for the robot-option as currently being explored in Japan’s “carebot project”.

Even taken on its own terms, the technological liberation thesis does not hold. The divide between paid and unpaid work, between a mother and a chef, is still very much in existence and jobs are still unevenly distributed and remunerated by a patriarchal system. With every new invention, it also becomes clearer that the technologisation of reproductive work has not eliminated its exploitative elements. Just as we know by now that no time is saved by machines, it remains doubtable whether there has been an actual speeding up of the cooking process in the West. Has it perhaps rather been outsourced from the kitchen to the factory, where the work is still being done in the hidden areas of fully industrialised societies?

The first pasta machines date back to the early 17th century. In the mid-19th century, commercially produced pasta was widely available throughout Italy. Meanwhile, the cultivation of wheat, spanning a period of 10,000 years, undertook a drastic change in the last 50 years. To enhance its resilience on the world market, its genetic make-up has been changed so dramatically that the metabolism of human beings – still much the same as 2,5 million years ago – cannot keep up with the genetically engineered grain.

Moreover, the fermentation process of bread dough that has been part of baking bread for millennia, taking place the night before the baking and reducing the amount of protein to make the bread more easily digestible and tastier, has been cut short since the age of industrialisation. More large-scale bakers, pasta and pizza producers are now using ready-made mixtures and frozen dough, and leading to a sharp decline in taste and a rise in intolerances. It is perhaps needless to add that the pressures placed on the yam or cassava root to change its genetic make-up in order to conform with the norms of the world trade system were not nearly as devastating.

And yet, even in societies that depend almost entirely on the consumption of quick and convenient wheat products, a poetics (in the original sense of “making”) of buttering bread, of fixing a tomato pasta sauce, of cutting up the vegetables of a salad, or decorating the base of a frozen pizza, serves as a reminder that the creative and the productive can never be completely divorced from the process of cooking.

Among the alternative economic models on a global scale – beyond social security and basic income grant schemes that operate on the basis of the same capitalist system – some economists have recently started to advocate for the introduction of a new distribution system based on the actual energy that goes into the production of a product. Only then, they argue, could the myth be dispelled that money is an adequate representation of human energy. Their basic unit of value would be the calorie. Finally, then, a system would be in place that values work according to its difficulty, its hardnesss, its social usefulness, the time or energy invested into a product.

Among the only downsides of such an approach would be that fufu in its current form would probably become unaffordable.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Stacy Hardy is a writer and senior editor at Chimurenga. She is also founding member of Black Ghost Books. Her collection of short fiction, Because the Night, was published by Pocko in 2015.

By Ibrahim al-Koni*. Interlink Pub Group, 2002

I met the news that Ibrahim al-Koni was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize with mixed emotions. Elated that this acclaimed, prolific author was finally being acknowledged outside the Arab world, but wary of the media hype that usually follows such accolades. But al-Koni didn’t win and his shortlisting did little to raise his profile in the West. The scattering of write-ups that appeared in the Anglophone press largely aligned him to the magical realist tradition (“readers of Garcia Marquez and Allende will want to know about al-Koni”), or described his work as fanatical eco-fiction. These labels do little to capture the literary, political and religious depth of his work.

Maybe it’s the complexity of al-Koni’s life and political affiliations that kept, and continue to keep, the media at bay, despite the growing number of translations of his work into English. Born in 1948 in the Nalut District of the Tripolitania region in north-western Libya, al-Koni learned Arabic as a second language – his mother tongue is Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg. As a young man, he was infused with the utopian revolutionary aspirations that chequered Libya’s recent history after the advent of the 1969 al-Fatah revolution and joined Qaddhafi’s government. Aligning himself with Socialist International, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity, in the mid-1970s he travelled to Moscow where he learnt Russian, worked as a journalist, and studied philosophy and comparative literature at the Maxim Gorky Institute, graduating with an MA thesis on Dostoyevsky. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the subsequent flourishing of criminal capitalism, he moved to Switzerland.

Over the course of his nomadic life, al-Koni has written more than 80 works, including novels, stories and aphorisms, all suffused with a combination of Sufi mysticism, socialism, Tuareg mythology and existentialism. While he refuses the idea of influences (“being influenced does not make writers of us. It is the spirit of having a mission that makes us do what we do, whether we want to or not.”), he cites Ecclesiastes, the Epistles of Saint Paul, the Upanishads, Laozi, the Egyptian priest Anhi, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Faulkner, Schopenhauer, Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Laxness, Camus, Asturias, Kawabata, Llosa, and more as “the lighthouses by which we can illuminate a trip that will certainly be nocturnal”.

The geography of his books is equally nomadic and nocturnal, refusing starkly lit division. As his English translator, Elliott Colla, points out in al-Koni’s map, the Sahara is not a boundary or “an isolated backwater”, but rather “a crucial articulating link, distinct but adjoining the Arabo-Berber Maghreb with the African Sahel”. Colla explains: “In placing the Tuareg at the center of his universe – a universe he composes solely in Arabic – he rewrites the places of Arabs and others on the maps.”

In al-Koni’s books, the Arab and Tuareg worlds are not separate, but entangled. What’s more, land is at the centre of the liberation struggle, not as a possession, something to be reclaimed or owned, or saved, but rather as an active force in the perpetual struggle against Western hegemony and imperialism. His novel, The Bleeding of the Stone, is a case in point. It is set in the desert, but here the desert is not really a place. It’s a transcendental, shadow of a place, a time-space maybe, but time-space in the desert is a mythical, nocturnal time, where past, present and future merge into an eternal moment. The desert holds everything, but in disguise, “it is a place with absolute freedom, a lost dimension between life and death”.

In The Bleeding of the Stone the space between nature and history is closed, the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. Moving fluidly through time and with multiple narrative shifts, the story follows Asouf, a solitary Bedouin and the sole keeper of the desert’s secret: where the legendary mouflon, a wild sheep whose meat is highly valued, hides. When two foreign hunters (who have already decimated the once-thriving gazelle population) order Asouf to show them the mouflon, he resists.

But Asouf does not challenge the colonisers alone. He has the desert as his teacher, and as the plot unfolds, it schools him in its trickster tactics and its magic – rippling of the mirages, shifting sands, sudden oasis. In the end, the colonists brutally kill Asouf, beating his head against the edge of a desert rock, but as they leap into the truck and switch on the engine, “great drops of rain” begin to “beat on its windows, washing away, too, the blood of the man crucified on the face of the rock”, washing it back into the sand, the soil, the earth from which it came, into the desert that now waits to swallow and avenge the colonising murders. As al-Koni writes in A Sleepless Eye, his 2014 collection of aphorisms: “In the desert we die in body but live in spirit.”

Al-Koni too has learned from this desert. His books might well be mythical and fantastical, operating in a realm between life and death, but to al-Koni myth is political; it has the capacity to embrace the public, the visionary, dreams, the revolutionary. Sailing past physical and national borders and comfort zones, transgressing the boundaries between man and nature, and protesting with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a people and the colonial brutalisation of the land, his writing performs an assault on the idea that words keep things separate. He writes from the point of impact; from the collision between languages, between forms and ideas, between cultures and religions. Yet despite their jarring encounters, the writing is agile and inventive, from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating; other times it drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words. Al-Koni translates the land, its people, the practice of translation itself, and the pulse of desire for freedom. What emerges is a politically theorised re-encounter.

With his linguistic and visionary commitment, his capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience and outside language, his ability to conjure entangled time-spaces, and his unyielding commitment to freedom, al-Koni opens new possibilities for writing. His books belong among the great works of African liberation.

*Translated by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley.

This review appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Emeka Ugwu is a Data Analyst who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. He also reviews books at Wawa Book Review.

Edited by Otosirieze Obi-Young. Brittle Paper, 2016.

Dear Reader,

To Whom It May Concern.

My name is Emeka Ugwu, I am a Wawa man. I write this letter to inform you about the state of affairs in the country where I was born, from a hamlet in Akegbe-Ugwu, the place my ancestors call home. As I write, Microsoft Word does not recognise either my name or that of my village. Regardless, from my name though, you may already figure I am an Igbo made in Nigeria (not from the American first nation), so I only need add that my country tells me my state of origin is Enugu. My green passport clearly indicates I was born in Port Harcourt, a city where I also feel at home.

I live in Lagos, that beautiful city by the lagoon, a place I also love to call my home. At the time of my birth in the year of my country’s first economic recession, 1981, Enugu, this city of coal buried afoot the Udi plateau, did not exist as a state. It was carved out 25 years ago by one General Ibrahim Babangida. If you asked me in the late 1980s, as my countrymen are wont to for mostly flimsy reasons, I would claim Anambra as my state of origin. So you see, in a way Onitsha is also a place where I am at home whenever I chance a visit.

On 1 October 2016, my country celebrated its 56th year of independence. Eighteen days after, I added another year myself. Both these events in a month when Africa celebrates two of her finest and most illustrious sons, Thomas Sankara and Fela Kuti, yield space for one to think about the deeper meaning of home and what it means to leave home in order to discover home. This question is at the centre of Enter Naija: The Book of Places, a new anthology edited by Otosirieze Obi-Young, and released online as an e-book with Brittle Paper.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places is an invitation to engage Nigeria as an idea, which might not yet have materialised, but has at least begun to crystallise as more and more subjects begin to understand their power as citizens. It is a collection of short stories, poems, visual art images, photographs and essays about places that crisscross this specific home, Nigeria, a nation-space that this book’s contributors all feel strongly about. It is a gift. A gesture made from a place of love. The book is free but priceless. It is a gambit not a gambol.

Considering the liberal cosmopolitan worldview that inspires this visionary work, one is inclined to pitch tents with Obi-Young who thinks “of places as people, with layers of distinctness never to be known until known, always retaining their capacity to startle,” if only to invoke an indaba that aims for “eclectic interpretations, full, rounded contemplations of physical features and population characteristics of places” like Kano, Auchi, Ikot Ekpene and Akure.

The young compatriots, who have taken up Obi-Young’s challenge and entered this Naija do not typify your ordinary Nigerian, for whom complaints usually signal strategy not noise. Individually, each stands out as an outlier whose outlook will mark the future. Collectively, they present a strategy to write about home by writing back home, from home. The bulk of them are university students or university graduates, some of whom are engaged in national youth service. Together they posit, as Tanure Ojaide does in his poem, that “It No Longer Matters Where You Live.”

The point is driven home in the story, “Scares on the Other Side of Beauty, or: The Neglected Facts of Ukanafun People” by Iduehe Udom. Here the graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka writes:

“Discussing the culture and traditions of the Ukanafun people, he mentioned Ekpo, Ekong. Ekpe, Utu-ekpe, Akoko, Ekon, Ewa-Ikang Udukghe, Usoro Afa Edia, Usoro Afa Isua, Usoro Ndo and Enin as the most interesting events. He mentioned that trading, fishing, hunting, farming, sculpturing and palm produce hold significant contributions to the slowed-down economy of the town since the civil war depopulated the area and kept it in a situation that many governments have made no efforts to help her recover from.”

If you ignore syntax, or the fact that I know little about these events myself, though I vaguely recall seeing the Ekpe masquerade-costume on a visit to the British Museum once, you will see how the neglected facts evoked in the story’s title help shape discourse about home.

The Ukanafun local government area was created in 1977 from Abak and Opobo divisions of the then Cross-River state. Today Ukanafun is a local government area in Akwa-Ibom, another state that was carved out alongside Enugu in 1991 and, as we learn in Udom’s story, it is a place that is yet to recover from the civil war of 1967–70. It is a place the Annang people call home.

Today under the banner of Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), there is a renewed call for secession by my Igbo people. Where do the Annang stand in relation to this? To understand this slippery slope, we will have to ask how the Annang man remembers Biafra. But first we must comprehend that Naija is home to 250 ethnic groups with 350 languages spread across 37 states.

These days most readers enter Nigeria through the work of my sister, Chimamanda Adichie. In May of 2014, Adichie’s piece, “Hiding From Our Past” and published in The New Yorker, took a dig at the “Nigerian government censors” who were delaying the release of the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun. “The war was the seminal event in Nigeria’s modern history, but I learnt little about it in school,” Adichie wrote, “‘Biafra’ was wrapped in mystery.” She goes on to explain:

“I became haunted by history. I spent years researching and writing Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel about human relationships during the war, centred on a young, privileged woman and her professor lover. It was a deeply personal project based on interviews with family members who were generous enough to mine their pain, yet I knew that it would, for many Nigerians of my generation, be as much history as literature.”

Adichie criticises the film’s censorship as “absurd”: “[S]ecurity operatives, uninformed and alert, gathered in a room watching a romantic film – the censor’s action is more disappointing than surprising, because it is a part of a larger Nigerian political culture that is steeped in denial, in looking away.” For my part, I find it rather curious that, in speaking out against censorship, she censors quite a significant bit of the Biafran impasse. Hiding behind her own past she looks away from the Igbo domination of Annang people.

Her working premise assumes ostensibly that since the “massacres in northern Nigeria” which targeted only “south-eastern Igbo people” inevitably led to a secession, the Efik, Ijaw, Ibibio and Itsekiri man relinquished his own identity, so it is okay to lump them together as Igbo people who share a common grievance. Ken Saro-Wiwa must be choking on a pipe in his grave. Remind me, what exactly the Ogoni man was on about in his book, On a Darkling Plain? My own sense is that truth sadly was the first casualty of the Nigerian civil war.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places invites readers to enter this impasse by taking a new approach. One that looks ahead instead of dwelling on the past. One that is inclusive instead of selective. In a time of Boko Haram, of increased hostilities in creeks of the Niger Delta, and of the scourge of cattle herdsmen, the question that reverberates most strongly for me is: how does Nigeria retreat in order to advance. Inertia?

Adichie suggests remembering by memorialising. She suggests building a memorial, and I concur but insist, one for all those who lost their lives during the civil war. Touched by the pain of the Annang people, who inhabit the landspace Udom illumines, I am drawn to more didactic approaches because, as physicist Cesar Hildago asserts in Why Information Grows: for complex systems like Nigeria the message is not its meaning. Yet the difference betwixt societies depends on how they order information. Nigeria is as weak as the weakest link in its network of people(s).

To bring my concern closer home, it is only fair considering I have appropriated Obi Egbuna’s Diary of a Homeless Prodigal as title of my own letter for an entirely selfish purpose. This allows me to place my writing into a network of other writing. It also allows me to edge this reflection towards his thoughts as expressed in one letter, “Meeting My People”. Egbuna questions hard: “How can I explain Che’s meaning that ten city intellectuals are worth less than one farmer in the village, that the African problem can never be solved by the African ‘Elite’ because the African ‘Elite’ is part of the problem?” The answer is not simple but there is an answer: organise and build.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places offers an entry point, one way of organising and building. It situates multiple places within a deeply fractured nation space wherein Egbuna’s searching question seeks an answer. It answers by sending messages about the human condition and lived experience so that we, the reader, can mine them for meaning fleshed out of information about the plight of people(s). It allows us to join the conversation by assembling our own answers. It shows how irrespective of ethnicity/religion, elite interests lie only in the appropriation of wealth and labour for the consolidation of state power. It shows that the solution to our problems resides in our ability to build expansive and inclusive social networks that allow us to leave home in order to discover home.

Thank you for your attention and time. I urge you, enter Naija, come see where we are going.

Prodigally Yours.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

“Second Transition” refers to the phase of liberation struggle in South Africa which began after the 1994 elections. It is also the title of a project by photographer Thabiso Sekgala (1981-2014), to document the ongoing struggle for land ownership and economic freedom in rural South Africa.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Nearly a decade on from the worst postcolonial turmoil that saw their currency devalued by thousands of percentage points, Zimbabweans have had to brace themselves as the government introduced another face-saving tender. The bond note, pegged at equal value to the US dollar, but not legal outside the country, is traded more often in comic sketch or as the source of derision, than in markets. Fungai Machirori reports from Harare.

A security guard stops me as I exit one of the popular fresh food shops at Harare’s upmarket Avondale shopping centre.

“Sister, you look like someone I can ask this question. Do you have a moment?”

I am confused by the request, but also a little curious. And so I decide to indulge her.

“Do you think these bond notes will take us back to 2008? Do you think God can let us suffer again like that year?”

She apologises for her candour. Such confronting enquiries (in Zimbabwe, at least) would ordinarily be softened by meandering pleasantries and chitchat, but it is the day that bond notes – after many months of speculation – have been released into circulation. And it is probably this that has emboldened her to be forthright in her questioning. In 2008 – a year that most Zimbabweans still associate with the nation’s worst postcolonial social, economic and political turmoil – she tells me she lost family members whose medical costs she could not meet because of the acute cash crisis of that time.

“I buried too many people then and I don’t want the same thing to happen ever again.”

I am not sure what to say, so I tell her what little I know about how the bond notes have been described to work. Through various media supplements and jingles, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has framed bond notes as a financial measure intended to ease the cash shortages that have seen many Zimbabweans spend whole days and nights in bank queues; sights which had, until last year, remained a spectre of 2008.

A surge in government borrowing, large tranches of misappropriated funds, inhibitive policies for external investment and poor export performance have collectively led to a critical shortage of cash in Zimbabwe’s multicurrency economy which has largely thrived on transactions made in US dollars since 2009. Bond notes are thus proposed as a means to plug this gap.

At the same time, they are intended to serve as a financially-related incentive. Pegged at a rate of 1:1 with the dollar, one of the main schemes associated with the bond notes is a performance-related bonus of five per cent as a way of incentivising large scale exporters, particularly within sectors such as tobacco farming. Also, to encourage diaspora remittances (said to already contribute about ten per cent of the nation’s GDP) through more formal channels, the RBZ has also introduced the Diaspora Remittances Incentives Scheme that is envisaged to reward money transfer agents and recipients of such transfers.

And yet many issues continue to colour the public’s perception of the new tender.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding the introduction of bond notes is the fact that many people do not understand what exactly this new tender is, or how it differs from the discontinued and distrusted Zimbabwe dollar. In the build-up to the issuance of the currency, the RBZ had assured that its introduction would be contingent upon citizens’ satisfactory understanding of its purpose. However, formal notice of the date of introduction of bond notes was only provided to the public two days before the currency entered the market. A bank whose employees leaked the first – and only – public images of the currency the day before its official launch, received a US$500,000 fine from the RBZ, with all involved employees being summarily dismissed.

Although media coverage – through public radio and TV jingles, posters and billboards – has increased over the last few months, this has done little to allay general fears and ensure comprehensive public awareness. Bond notes were further conspicuous by their absence from President Robert Mugabe’s year-end state of the nation address. Uncertainty is exacerbated by some retailers, who have either refused to accept bond notes from customers, or have created dual payment systems with lower prices offered to those able to make cash payments in US dollars.

Another sticking point is the pegging of the currency, only recognised as legal tender within Zimbabwe, at the same rate as the US dollar. Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa stated in the weeks running up to the note’s introduction: “If one owes you money in US dollars, you must accept payment in bond notes. You cannot refuse.” However, in a News Day piece by Zimbabwe’s former finance minister, Tendai Biti, and international policy analyst, Todd Moss, the two opine that since bond notes are not legal tender anywhere outside of Zimbabwe, they cannot logically hold an equal value to the US dollar, a global currency. In essence, they conclude that bond notes are certain to devalue over time, pushing up their exchange rate to the dollar. Such a scenario would inevitably offset further USD shortages and hyperinflationary conditions.

Yet another source of discontent is a lack of clarity about how ordinary citizens will benefit from the issuance of bond notes. Some say they only see the currency favouring large-scale exporters through the export incentive. As a result, there are suspicions that bond notes are not intended to serve the general public’s interests, but rather niche interests and those of the government.

That there is a disconnect between the perceived interests of citizens and the government is telling of a nation that in 2016 broke into atypical public protest, driven in great part by the rise of the #ThisFlag citizens’ movement led by Pastor Evan Mawarire, whose sentiments resonated deeply with many Zimbabwean social media users. Prior to bond notes becoming legal tender, #ThisFlag printed and circulated its own version of the notes – derisively called “bond nots”. Featuring images of provocative figures such as the president and the first lady, Grace Mugabe, among others, the faux currency was intended as a form of protest against the government’s financial mismanagement. The real currency is facetiously referred to as “bondage notes” or “Bob notes”

With such rising frustrations, and the emergence of public humour as a staple of survival, it is no surprise that alternative media genres – in the form of comedy and satire – continue to grow as sources of entertainment and social commentary around the new currency. In a skit produced by the popular Bustop TV, a character known as Comic Pastor stands accused of hoarding the paper used to print bond notes from South Africa. After repeated interrogation, it is found that it is actually reams of bond paper that he is in possession of. In yet another skit, by Magamba TV, bond notes are explained through the analogy of two popular sadza accompaniments, high-end oxtail and the more economical kapenta (Tanganyika sardine), whose equivalent value as relish is brought into humorous question.

For a people who have practised “mattress banking” and watched their savings and salaries devalue to worthless bricks of bank notes before, bond notes elicit all too real feelings of apprehension and angst. Popularised in 2008, “cash burning” – a system of selling US dollars in cash at a premium payable via bank transfer – has returned and the environment for a thriving black market continues to grow. And while a plastic economy, or cashless society, is becoming more evident, this remains a difficult culture to adopt among a people largely distrustful of formal institutions such as banks and the government. Moreover, for those most affected by this cash crisis – making their living through the small scale and/or informal economy – paper cash remains a paramount currency for everyday life.

The night before the bond notes were released, I tweeted my personal corruption of the popular poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. I wrote:

‘Twas the night before #bondnotes,

when all through the house,

not a creature was ready, not even a mouse.

#holdsbreath

This was retweeted almost 50 times and responses of uncertainty exchanged. Now, a few months later, there remains general distrust, albeit amid relief that the currency continues to trade (at time of writing) at 1:1 with the US dollar.

I am not sure if any part of my explanation about the bond notes allays the security guard’s fears that Monday evening when we meet. But soon we are both having a laugh, recalling the bizarre events of our lives back in 2008. I tell her of the time I fainted as I stood in line for bread during an intense heat wave. And she reminds me of that difficult winter when basic foodstuffs like salt became luxuries, when airtime cost trillions of dollars. We part on this note, and wish each other well, committing the fate of our nation – with cautious hope – to those beyond our conversation.

Zimbabweans have known the surreal experience of moving through empty grocery aisles, the sight of derelict shelves and freezers at each hopeful turn. They have also known the indignities of buying bread and milk and eggs at illicit vending spots in unsanitary lanes where the drunk and incontinent release their waste.

For now, food remains abundant and high-end shops and shopping complexes continue to make brisk business. Even if most Zimbabweans can’t afford much beyond the basics, it is still a small comfort that on the surface, all remains ordered and calm.

At least for now.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/in-bond-we-trust/feed/08694Your Own Hand Sold You: Voluntary servitude in the Francafriquehttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/your-own-hand-sold-you-voluntary-servitude-in-the-francafrique/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/your-own-hand-sold-you-voluntary-servitude-in-the-francafrique/#respondWed, 24 May 2017 11:07:33 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=8683

In the CFA franc, the French colonial mission in West Africa found a way to ensure a paternalist and pernicious stranglehold on the economies of a vast region of the continent. Critics are vociferous and persistent in decrying its catastrophic effects on the socio-economic development of 150 million people in 15 countries over more than seven decades. French corporations and African elites are the few beneficiaries of CFA-zone machinations. Historically, those who opposed the currency risked alienating the metropole and were on the receiving end of its intransigence and outright violence. Not much has changed, writes Moses Marz, and a significant shift in the mindset of the French bureaucracy is the only likely remedy for monetary servitude in the Francafrique.

On 7 January this year, the Front Anti CFA organised by NGO Urgences Panafricanistes for a demonstration at the Place de l’Obélisque, a plaza commemorating Senegal’s 1960 independence from France. A set of plastic chairs is arranged in a circle. Kémi Séba is standing at the centre, wearing a tightly cut purple boubou with an Africa symbol over the pocket. About 50 people are sitting or standing around him, listening to his rant against the CFA franc, the currency that Charles de Gaulle created in 1945 for the Colonies Françaises d’Afrique, only renaming it into Coopération Financière en Afrique after the wave of formal decolonisations in 1960, but still used in order for France to remain in control of its former colonies. Séba tells his listeners that de Gaulle adopted the CFA from the Nazis’ occupation of France and that during slavery the French also told them that they were better off as slaves, that they would get food every day and that liberation would be too risky. Hulo Guillabert, who is in the audience, responds: “No, we don’t give a shit if it is risky. We don’t want this CFA anymore. If that means we’ll die, we’ll die!” Gaïnde, also in the audience, explains: “If there are only a few of us here today, it is because we are already in the future. We no longer live in the past. We are the thinkers and actors of the avant-garde. We are already sovereign. We are already independent. Now we need to spread this message to get a critical mass.”

For Séba, the founder of Urgences Panafricanistes, it is clear that the struggle against the CFA cannot take place on a national level and needs to move gradually from sensitisations to mobilisation and to a boycott of French products. The franc zone includes a population of 150 million people across eight countries forming part of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo), as well as seven Central African countries forming part of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (Cameroon, DR Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic and Chad) and the Comoros. The demonstrations on 7 January take place simultaneously in Abidjan, Bamako, Bohicon, Bologna, Brussels, Casamance, Dakar, Haiti, Kinshasa, London, Ouagadougou, Ouidah and Paris, a new pan-African map that, for now, mainly exists in online discussions among university students.

On 14 December 2016, Ali Laidi interviews Kako Nubukpo on his France 24 TV-show Intelligence Economique. Since his dismissal as minister in the Togolese government, Nubukpo is a frequent guest at talk shows and round tables on the CFA, promoting his new book Sortir l’Afrique de laservitude monétaire – A qui profite le franc CFA? (Freeing Africa from Monetary Servitude – Who profits from the CFA franc?) When he lists the negative aspects of the currency, one after the other, a disarming smile accompanies what must be a delicate topic for the audience. Preferring to speak of servitude instead of neo-colonialism and diplomatically calling for greater flexibility instead of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”, Nubukpo quickly convinces the moderator of his views. Towards the end of the show, Laidi himself ends up referring to the currency as an “incredible absurdity”.

A year earlier, at the occasion of the 55th anniversary of Chad’s independence in N’Djamena, Idriss Déby, Chad’s president since 1990 and graduate of Qaddhafi’s World Revolutionary Centre, announced unexpectedly that it is time to “cut a string that is preventing Africa from developing”, calling for the creation of a proper African currency that no longer relies on postcolonial mechanisms of domination. At first no one knew what to make of this statement by a Françafrique faithful. Was he trying to threaten French authorities because they did not support his 2016 re-election campaign? Was this connected to his country’s war against Boko Haram? Déby repeated his claims in a Jeune Afrique interview in February 2017, stating that “a revision of the terms of cooperation is absolutely necessary and unavoidable”. His pronouncements hover in the background of the ongoing discussion as a broken taboo, and an indication of the possibility of a change of mind in the current generation of African politicians.

What at first looked like the annual rehearsal of anti-CFA rhetoric has taken another discursive dimension after the currency’s 70th anniversary in 2015. The unlikely confluence of interests between Nubukpo, an economist-turned-academic, Déby, the autocratic ruler of Chad, and Séba, a professional pan Africanist with links to the Nation of Islam, has combined the technical and symbolic anti-CFA arguments to move the debate away from discussions about the possible effects of another devaluation – a concern that preoccupied the debate before – towards a complete abolition of the currency.

Kémi Séba’s anti-CFA project has been more successful than any other of his previous organisations, two of which were disbanded by the French government for anti-Semitism and inciting racial violence. Fashioning himself as a black radical in the line of Malcom X and Cheikh Anta Diop – with books such as Supra-Négritude and Black Nihilism – and having recently changed supremacist views for what he calls ethno-differencialism, Séba moved from France to Senegal to benefit from greater levels of freedom of expression.

Before his contract with the Togolese government, Kako Nubupko worked for the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) for three years before posts at business schools in Lyon, Oxford and Princeton. He has experienced the power and intellectual laziness of bureaucratic routine first hand. He is confident that a change of mentality is taking place – at least in the French administration. His talk about the strategies of the Asian Dragons, the disjuncture between South Korea and Senegal’s monetary policies, and the Millennium Development Goals, at times neatly fits into an African Rising discourse and has pushed the level of attention in French media significantly higher than the academic works of Nicolas Agbohou and Moussa Dembélé, who carried the discursive torch on the CFA franc up to 2014.

Around these figures, a larger conglomeration of politicians, artists, technocrats and activists has gathered across different continents, including people as diametrically opposed as the French right wing politician Marine Le Pen and Mamadou Koulibaly, former Ivorian Finance minister in Laurent Gbagbo’s government.

Currency Can Get You Killed

Historically, going against the CFA franc has come with a high price in Franco-African relations. Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, was assassinated in 1963 shortly after announcing his intention of creating his own currency. In the hours leading up to his murder, the French and American ambassadors to Togo exchanged phone calls, essentially extraditing him to Gnassingbé Eyadéma and the group of soldiers around him that was demobilised by the French colonial army and wanted a space in the new Togolese army. Eyadéma eventually became president in 1967 and, backed by France, remained in power until his death in 2005. Olympio’s death sentence was pronounced as early as his first meeting with Jacques Foccart, the “shadow man” of France’s Africa policy from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac. After their talk at the Elysée, Foccart simply said about Olympio: “He is not one of our friends”.

Half a century later, in 2011, the assassination of Muammar Qaddhafi is also, in part, linked to the CFA. The recent Wikileaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails revealed that Nicolas Sarkozy’s motivation for the military intervention in Libya was to prevent Qaddhafi from launching his own pan African currency backed by his reserves of 143 tons of gold and silver, prospectively ridding France of its dominance over francophone Africa. Laurent Gbagbo’s anti CFA stance, since his election campaign of 2000 to the bombing of his residence in 2011, eventually lead to his ICC detention in The Hague – the West’s current preferred means of political elimination of inconvenient African rulers.

In the context of Françafrique, the mafia-like network of French and African elites that grew out of Foccart’s network and still works to maintain France’s geopolitical, military, cultural and institutional dominance in its former colonies, the monetary system of the CFA functions as the cement holding these different spheres together. Although the CFA underwent several adjustments over the last 70 years, its main goal has remained the same: to preserve the value of the currency – by all means necessary.

The tools used for this include, in official economist language, a fixed exchange rate between the CFA franc and the euro set in stone at the equivalent of CFA655.957 to €1; the centralisation of 50 per cent of foreign exchange reserves at the French Treasury, to guarantee “unlimited convertibility” in France; the freedom of transfers within the area and the fixed parity between the two African sub-regions part of the CFA zone. A last unofficial principle holds that the French Central Bank has the veto right in all management decisions by BCEAO, based in Dakar, and the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), based in Yaoundé. The integration of the French franc into the eurozone in 1999 did not affect this arrangement at all. The CFA continues as an enclave in the new system as if nothing happened, like in colonial times when the metropole’s imperative was to import cheap primary resources from the colonies under the auspices of normal economic practice.

Protests against the CFA are not new. They have been around since its inception and resurface on a regular basis. Over the last seven decades, dependency theorists, liberal economists, Marxists and pan Africanists have created a canon of articles and books devoted to the critique of the CFA. Osendé Afana’s L’Economie De L’Ouest-Africain (1966), Pathé Diagne’s Pour l‘unité ouest-africaine (1972) and Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi’s Monnaie, Servitude et Liberte (1980) form part of that tradition. Nubukpo’s Sortir l’Afrique de la servitude monétaire is only the latest contribution forming the analytical background to the current protest.

In these works, the CFA still stands for a lack of sovereignty for the African member states. A state or a federation of states that cannot decide on its own when to raise or lower the value of its currency, to adjust to new developments by changing course, is devoid of any political capacity and has no way of bettering its economic position. It is, for example, a common-place notion that it would benefit Malian or Beninese cotton producers a great deal if the CFA franc were no longer overvalued through its tie to the euro.

In terms of hard socio-economic results, any economist would struggle to disprove the fact that the 15 countries that make up the franc zone are part of the poorest of Africa. In the terms of the UN data of reference for international organisations, seven out of eight UEMOA-countries (West African Economic and Monetary Union) are classified as “least developed countries,” with nine out of 10 people living on the equivalent of US$2 a day. Ivory Coast, the only exception and the largest contributor to BCEAO making up to 40 per cent of its resources, was a “heavily indebted poor country” according to the IMF before Alassane Ouattara, formerly of BCEAO and IMF, and the guardian of Françafrique, became president and received a debt cancellation gift from his former colleagues in New York.

Despite being in existence for seven decades, the CFA franc has done next to nothing for the regional integration of its member countries. The level of imports within the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) is less than 15 per cent of their total imports, only four per cent in the case of CEMAC, the Central African equivalent – compared with 60 per cent within the EU zone, for example. This is not surprising since in the logic of extraversion there is no space for horizontal relations. Meanwhile, in terms of legal financial flows, French companies like Bolloré, Total, Societé Générale, BNP-Paribas, Orange and France Télécom get the main state tenders through the well-oiled channels of Françafrique and can operate without the risk of depreciating currency and with easy transfers back home. In terms of illegal financial flows (IFF), the free capital movement that is part of the CFA agreement leaves member countries no power to control the sums being transferred in and out of the country. On the IFF heat map, Ivory Coast is marked in deep red and, even more embarrassingly, BEAC governors were caught by Wikileaks transferring €500 million to the Societé Générale.

Moreover, the fact that the CFA agreement dictates that African countries have to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French treasury deprives these countries of vital resources to finance their own projects. The part of the interest on this money that France transfers back is declared as development aid. In 2005, it was reported that €72 billion had accumulated as reserves in the French treasury over the last 50 years. The amount equals a coverage rate of 110 per cent – when the agreement only prescribes a rate of 20 per cent.

What makes no economic sense to the CFA-critics is a source of pride for Ouattara, the most fervent defender of the CFA. Repeatedly referring to his credentials as former governor of BCEAO, the Ivorian president proclaimed in 2016: “I can assure you that the CFA has been well-managed by Africans”, citing as the main reason that the zone is one of the few that has a coverage rate of 100 per cent.

Kaku Nubukpo reads in this behaviour by the central banks a voluntary subjugation that can be explained by African rulers’ attempts to cast themselves as “good pupils of monetary orthodoxy” – to create the impression of a credible monetary zone in what is, by financial standards, an absolute catastrophe. The extraordinary high interest rates the African central banks place on credits given to businesses and their decision to prioritise keeping inflation levels low form part of the dogma of the 1980s. By limiting inflation levels to two per cent, the same way the European Central Bank does, the BCEAO follows the simple logic of “what is good for Europe is good for us”, which is particularly absurd given that, in times of crisis, the European Central Bank is the first bank to leave monetarist orthodoxy behind.

While technocrats, importers and urban elites might benefit from the CFA, buying imported products and property that does not lose its value, for the overwhelming number of people living in rural areas it would be better otherwise.

*

The only real public outcry across the CFA franc region came in 1994 when the French government of Edouard Balladur decided unilaterally to cut the value of the CFA in half, following structural adjustment pressures of the IMF and World Bank. The news reached the African heads of state while they were discussing the future of the already financially defunct continental airline, Air Afrique. It was up to Alassane Ouattara, then prime minister in the regime of Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Foccart’s best friend in Africa, to convince all the other presidents to sign off the devaluation. The official announcement by Balladour was that the “CFA franc was devalued in 1994 at the instigation of France, because we felt it was the best way to help these countries in their development”.

What was, politically, an embarrassment for the heads of state and unmasked their neocolonial dependence on France, had even more drastic consequences for the populations of the member states. People were completely unprepared for the devaluation and had their purchasing power effectively cut in half. The devaluation marked the beginning of an ongoing recession and the end of a period up to the mid-1980s in which the franc zone states saw relatively strong levels of economic growth and greater stability than neighbouring countries, Ghana and Nigeria.

Still, although the trauma of 1994 lives on, nothing has changed in the architecture of the currency.

The neat, neoliberal separation of economy, politics, culture and history forms part of the explanation why, with all the counter-arguments in place, the CFA is still around. From the brightly lit France 24 TV studios and the amazingly local sounding RFI Afrique broadcasts, to the weekly covers of the Jeune Afrique magazine carrying the posh image of the powerful big man in a suit, there is a complete world in which a “CFA fort”, a strong currency, appears completely natural and is even a source of pride.

In this world, it also makes sense to depict the contours of France hovering over West and Central Africa like holy spirit, as on the map of the 40th anniversary of the CFA. Or for a 2005 French law to be passed by parliament that reads: “School courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa.” Or for François Fillon, the current Republican candidate for the French presidential election to declare, on the same subject, that France cannot be sentenced “guilty for wanting to share its culture with the people of Africa”.

Trying to make sense of France’s inability to engage its colonial past and present, academics have reverted to psychoanalytical models to explain what Achille Mbembe calls the “long imperial winter” of France, referring to narcissism, a desire for apartheid, or just that: racism. To keep the marriage with such an abusive partner alive, the franc zone cannot but maintain the practice of servitude volontaire as a kind of masochism that keeps the cooperation alive.

The illusion that money is nothing but a means of exchange, a reflection of the objects that can be bought with it, or a precious metal with an intrinsic value, has been propagated by Euroliberalists who, since the end of the Second World War, want to keep currency debates as far away from politics as possible.

Anthropologists know that money has always functioned much like a semantic system that has historically more to do with appeasing social relations between human beings and the gods, through sacrifice or payments of debt, hence the etymological roots of to pay. Money does more than establish equivalences – it contains violence and its main social function is the construction of the state and a stabilisation of norms of consumption.

The coins and notes of the CFA efface any political reference, other than those to modernity itself. The separation between planes, satellite dishes, trains, @-signs and electromagnetic waves on the obverse part of the notes, and birds, fish, hippopotami and camels on the reverse leave a distance of modern civilisation that needs to be crossed from one part of the bill to the other.

When operating in this logic it also makes sense to accept the explanation given by the Central Bank of France – flanked by representatives of BCEAO and BEAC – in a recent press conference to the question why CFA franc notes, which are after all printed in France, cannot be exchanged in France. To avoid the threats of financial terrorism and the circulation of false money, it has opted to only accept modern means of financial transactions – in other words, electronic transfers to France. At last, the number itself has out-ruled all other symbols. And who wouldn’t want to be modern?

*

There is no agreement on a way forward among the activists and economists of the Front Anti CFA. There is no evidence that opting either for single currencies or other regional ones will, in any way, be better. What is clear, however, is that lack of political will has hindered projects such as the common ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) currency, lying dormant since 2005, or a similar project by the East African Community started in 2010. The way Germany dealt with Greece in proper colonial terms – accusing it of collective laziness and unreliability – in the recent crisis is a prominent example for demonstrating that a currency needs a union of solidarity across individual national markets.

So, if a natural disaster does not strike, it looks like, again, only change among the French bureaucrats is going to bring about a change in the CFA zone. France has for a long time been good at downplaying the benefits it draws from retaining its colonial ties. Chances are that, behind the curtain, the administrators are no longer sure whether it makes sense to keep the zone in place once a wider audience finds out what happens in its African pré-carré. Its main trade partners in Africa are Angola, Nigeria and South Africa. And they are using their own currencies in any case. A sign in that direction was that, for the first time since the time of decolonisation, and in the immediate aftermath of the wave of Front Anti CFA protests, the French foreign ministry issued a questionnaire to the African students of the Paris Institute of Political Science, the reproductive machine of the French political elite, to ask them what they think about the CFA.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

I have debated about writing this for days, in case it has a negative effect on my ability to freely do the things I like doing, like eating fish in the open air pubs at Mulungu Beach in Munyonyo, devouring pork with friends in the roadside cafes in Wandegeya, or having cold ones in backstreet Kabalagala. I have always found a reason, if not an excuse, to travel to Kampala, which is much closer to my home village in Teso than to Nairobi, my country’s capital.

For me, Uganda has always held a deeply sentimental value. Growing up in Busia, at the Kenya-Uganda border, my childhood friends and I knew that everything fancier was always on the Ugandan side of the border. Our fathers went to drink there, bringing back stories that remain alive to this day. All the delicacies we enjoyed – the fish, the roast bananas, the goat meat, nearly always originated from Uganda, and every Saturday morning my friends and I wandered outside Ugandan warehouses in search of the nylon paper and manila strands we used to sew our soccer balls. As a child, I entered Uganda as I would a neighbour’s house. In fact, a good number of my primary school classmates crossed back into Uganda for lunch at home, returning to Kenya to attend their afternoon classes.

Sofia, on the Ugandan side of the border, remains an all time favourite destination for food and drinks. I have never understood, or cared to investigate, how my favourite Kenyan beer, Tusker, retails at one-third of the price I pay for it in Nairobi. Culturally, as an Itesot, my king’s throne is situated in Uganda. I was once filled with cultural pride on seeing a huge billboard advertisement in Kampala by telecommunications giant Orange simply saying “Yoga”, translating the company’s “Hello” tagline into Iteso. Seeing such in Nairobi, where I am almost always the first Iteso my friends have met, would be a pipe dream. To take it further, my maternal great grandmother, Marisiano, has her roots in Uganda, and as an idealistic student activist, just graduated and on the run, your government granted me political asylum.

As you can see, Uganda is more than a second home to me. I hope my writing this will not jeopardise that in any way.

A few days before her arrest in Kampala, Uganda, I sent Dr. Stella Nyanzi a Facebook message of solidarity. She had had run-ins with your government, for what was seen as her indecent attacks on Facebook on your person and the person of the First Lady, Janet Museveni. As someone who has faced personal political upheavals before, I quickly understood the weight of the circumstances Dr. Nyanzi was looking at, and decided to quietly reach out so that she wouldn’t think my silence persisting.

Facebook is where I sent my message of condolence to Dr. Nyanzi on the passing of her father, whom she heavily mourned, on Facebook. Facebook is where I have known of her closeness to her three children. Facebook is where she has teased, cajoled, persuaded and protested. Facebook is where she has celebrated Luganda culture, helping me understand the meaning of Nalongo, as a mother of twins, a name which until then I only associated with Nalongo’s, the most popular pub in Sofia. Importantly, Facebook is where I first got in touch with her for an interview for “Facing the Mediterranean”, a three-part series I wrote on Ugandans in Kenya seeking refuge because of fear of persecution based on their sexual orientation.

To Dr. Nyanzi, Facebook is more than a platform of attack. It is a space she inhabits, a channel for communication, a diary, maybe even a confidant. It must also be a political comrade, with whom she shares and expresses her joys and frustrations. The first time I met her at her office at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Dr. Nyanzi warned me that she curses a lot. “Be warned,” she said, “I use curse words a lot.” The fact that I was recording the interview didn’t deter her. Indeed, she cursed a lot, possibly because the subject was emotionally heavy and close to her heart.

I had been apprehensive about meeting Dr. Nyanzi, thinking she was a stand-offish academic who had no time for my journalistic pestering. But to my surprise, the moment we shook hands and started talking, I realised she was the direct opposite of what I had imagined her to be – a no-nonsense activist and researcher. She asked me to tell her about myself, and all she took away was that I had been a hothead during my university days, and she oscillated between teasing and complementing my younger self. She was generous with her time, in her lower ground floor office, which she told me could be bugged, but she really didn’t care. We spoke for nearly two hours, and she didn’t censor herself one bit. It is an afternoon I will not forget.

In the end, Dr. Nyanzi asked me how safe I thought I was moving around investigating the story. I told her I believed I was relatively safe, because in my view, I was merely a journalist reporting on an urgent story that had gone unattended. She told me not to take things for granted, asking me to make sure I backed up all my interviews. She then gave me her phone number, asking me to only call her if I needed bail. I laughed at this but knew exactly what she meant.

Not long after, my story was nominated for the 2016 CNN Multichoice African Journalist of the Year Awards. At the awards ceremony in Johannesburg, South Africa, my name was called out as one of the two finalists in the Features category. The bit of the story that had been selected by the organizers to display on the huge screen on stage was part of my conversation with Dr. Nyanzi.

Why the passage was picked I have no idea, but it showed how Dr. Nyanzi was not only a leading social scientist, but also a human being who sympathised with the condition of other human beings, the Ugandan refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya, who referred to her as “Mama Stella”. After the event, a senior Kenyan journalist approached me and asked, “You mean you’ve interviewed Dr. Nyanzi? I follow her on Facebook.”

Mr. President, yours is an exceptional country, with exceptional individuals. Dr. Stella Nyanzi is one of those. I have read of the difficult circumstances you and your comrades encountered in seeking regime change in Uganda in the early 1980s, how you fought in the bush whileyour wife and children were exiled in Sweden. I suspect you all must have had a sadness about being apart. I believe Dr. Nyanzi and her children are currently facing the same predicament.

I know Dr. Nyanzi will reprimand me for pleading her case, and say that she doesn’t need your mercy or sympathy or that of anyone in your family or regime. But I am willing to take her reprimand, in that very fruity language that you and many others should know by now. She will especially heavily reprimand me for pleading the case incorrectly, using humanitarian grounds as opposed to defending her rights as a Ugandan and an intellectual. I am willing to take that reprimand too, again, in her very fruity language, if my plea will see the end to her incarceration.

Mr. President, please let Dr. Nyanzi go back to her work and her children. That is not to say that she will be silent, because it is in her nature to speak up. We read a lot about your days as a young Marxist idealist at the University of Dar es Salaam. You were part of a generation of African intellectuals, some militant, as you yourself turned out to be, who believed in charting a new course for the continent, a monumental task at the time.

If the hand of time was to go back, Mr. President, you’d understand the need for critiquing a regime and its policies. Yours was an even more potent need; that of urgently seeking regime change either through the ballot or the bullet. I cannot help but see echoes of this young idealist in Dr. Nyanzi, only that hers is not a pursuit for political power, but for the basic rights of fellow citizens. She has not deployed bullets. Only words. I implore that you set her free, Mr. President, for she does not deserve to be separated from her family.

I write from a place of complete obscurity, hoping my words, too, will catch the king’s ear.

In Seeing, Jose Saramago’s novel about the death of democracy, citizens in the capital city of an unnamed country calmly disengage from the ritual of elections, in which they have lost faith. The state retaliates by sealing off the city and withdrawing all public services, and in response residents organise themselves to sustain order in the absence of government systems. Garbage is collected. Peace is maintained. Life goes on. This worsens the government’s distress, as it presents them with an even deeper existential threat: redundancy.

Saramago’s prophetic tale came to mind when I started following the response of Ugandan academic Dr. Stella Nyanzi to the government’s failure to provide sanitary pads to schoolgirls who cannot afford them. Incensed by the government’s claim that they lacked money to fulfil their election campaign promise, Nyanzi launched a crowdfunded campaign of her own, Pads4GirlsUg, which elicited a strong show of support from the public. In just a few weeks, the campaign raised thousands of dollars and distributed pads to over 2 000 schoolgirls across four districts.

Inevitably, the state was sidelined from this impressive display of active citizenship, which cast it as both unreliable and redundant when it comes to sanitary health for Uganda’s schoolgirls. “Ugandans have moved away from, ‘we beg the government to help us’,” Nyanzi declared in an interview with Ugandan weekly The Observer. “They say that if the government is impotent, let’s be our own men and impregnate our own women”.

Nyanzi, who is known for deploying vivid sexual metaphors as a tool to invoke outrage over injustice, also used her widely-followed Facebook page to deliver scathing commentary targeting President Yoweri Museveni and first lady, Janet Museveni, who is also the Minister of Education and Sports. On 7 April, Nyanzi was arrested and charged with cyber harassment, for posting “a suggestion or proposal referring to his Excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni as among others ‘a pair of buttocks’ which suggestion/proposal is obscene or indecent.”

In other words, Nyanzi was arrested, and has now spent almost three weeks in jail without a bail hearing, for being rude. Her type of activism, while unique in contemporary Ugandan politics – Charles Onyango Obbo has describedher as “our first neck-on-the-chopping-block female social media combatant” – is not entirely new to Uganda’s political landscape. Several days before her arrest, Nyanzi posted a paperby historian Carol Summers titled, Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s, challenging her followers to “know our rich history before you think I am the first fighter with words”.

This paper, which has done the rounds since her arrest, is centered on the most famous RSVP in Ugandan history, activist Ssemakula Mulumba’s 18-page rejection of the Bishop of Uganda’s invitation to dinner in 1948. Summers dives into historical records that illustrate how radical activists of the time used rudeness strategically, to provoke the colonial government and citizens alike into a naked confrontation of oppression that was blunted by the emphasis on good manners in politics. This emphasis was central to Britain’s rule in Uganda, allowing it to brush past conflicts in the name of civility: as the Bishop had written to Mulumba, “there is no reason that we should not be on friendly terms, even if you dislike me officially”.

Mulumba, repulsed, rejected the Bishop’s invitation on account of the “foul activities” of the British in Uganda, whom he accused of turning his country into “a pigsty for white swine”. His letter, although addressed to the Bishop, was also intended for the general public. In the analog equivalent of a viral digital post, copies were printed and distributed in Uganda by his comrades. When the British objected to his rudeness, Mulumba unleashed even more vitriol, accusing the Bishop of “disdainful filth” and defiantly asserting that “I know, the [first] letter was spicy, because I took time and care to season it well for you…”

Due to their extremism, Summers writes, these radical activists were sometimes painted as insane — much as the state has now sought to use the Mental Treatment Act against Nyanzi, which lawyer Tricia Twasiima describes as “a colonial law formerly reserved for Africans who demanded for freedom”. But from the perspective of Mulumba and his colleagues, the real insanity lay in oppressive British rule, which sought to both slap their face and shake their hand in one motion. A similar perspective has been raised by many of Nyanzi’s supporters in Uganda today, where her activism channels broader frustrations around chronic problems with public sector services.

In The Observer, Dr. Jimmy Spire Ssentongo marvels that “Our leaders ironically fail to understand our madness, much of which is their making! Such is the bizarre structure of our society that although many of us are insane, the calamitous madness of the powerful always finds exemption while that of the powerless is condemned.” Atuki Turner comments in The Monitor that the real vulgarity does not lie in Nyanzi’s use of language, but in “the situation of the hundreds of girls who have been shamed, teased, ridiculed, laughed at, until they’ve cowered with embarrassment or run out of class in tears, or stayed at home in shame, because of their menstrual periods”.

It is disingenuous to demand respectability in citizens’ responses to a politics that is not respectable. But this principle, however intuitive, is at odds with the popularised understanding of active citizenship, which has been rooted in the vague pursuit of “a seat at the table”. Nyanzi is in prison because, like the citizens of Saramago’s fictional city, she chose instead to construct another table with and for the people, while exposing the vulgarities of the high table in the harshest possible light. Like Mulumba, she was not interested in an easy dinner, but rather in disrupting the enforced respectability in oppression. This is a different kind of active citizenship, and perhaps the most effective kind, when dealing with states that are not responsive to the needs of their people.

Pads4GirlsUg continued to publicise their work in the days leading up to Nyanzi’s second court appearance, while other citizens announced their plans to collect sanitary pad donations at an upcoming music festival. But as Nyanzi and her lawyers sat in the high court on 26 April, with journalists and the general public banned from observing court proceedings, the Minister of Education declared her intent to look into non-governmental organisations that independently distribute pads to schools — adding skeptically, “if they are there”.

The proliferation of MA in Creative Writing programmes at universities raises questions of how creative practice is being institutionalised, incorporated, and made complicit within the system. Amidst calls to decolonise South Africa’s education curriculum, three writer-teachers reflect on how and why they teach, and on the possibilities of a committed and emancipatory teaching praxis. The following pieces are drawn from presentations given at the 2016 Teaching Practices in Creative Writing colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

Outside the Classroom/Off the Page

Lesego Rampolokeng

That I end up teaching in the Rhodes MACW course is near miraculous, since, from a very early age, I was not encouraged to read. I had this very evil aunt – she was very terrible, vicious – who stood against the existence of books in the house. Books breed rats, she said, and if you have books you are going to have an abundance of cockroaches in the house. So she would take the books and throw them out to be rained on in the yard. I think that’s where I started struggling with the written word.

The spoken word… I got my first taste of poetry, of the musicality of the word, in the inherent rhythms of language from my grandmother, who could not read or write, except the numbers one to 36… that’s because she played Fa-fi. I’m not joking when I say that for poetic flow, for cadence, for rhythm and, you know, rhyme, this Eminem guy or Nas or whoever would stand no chance against my grandmother.

So books themselves were burned and burned, but the spoken word itself kept coming, with all the poetry I could possibly imagine. I got that from my grandmother. I came out of, for instance, the church, the Catholic church, because that’s where I encountered the poetry of Black Consciousness. Regina Mundi in Soweto was one place where you could have Ingoapele Madingoane, Matsemela Manaka, Maishe Maponya perform for us and my brothers.

Most creative writing teaching occurs outside the classroom. Those of us who frequent shebeens can attest to the fact that the art of storytelling is in there. There are no greater storytellers than drunkards and children, and for these I was always first in the audience. Like Bosman says, it’s no use having a great story if you don’t know what to leave out, where to introduce the tension, or whatever. That I got in shebeens, that I got in kindergarten grounds listening to children speak. That’s where I got a knowledge of where to hone my writing. That’s why it’s rather ridiculous to be saying to a creative writing teacher that they shouldn’t fraternise with their students, as has been said to me. I prefer to drink with my students and that’s exactly where the writing gets to happen. Dambudzo Marechera’s Scrapiron Blues includes a whole lot of shebeen tales, as he called them.

I refuse to regard creative writing as something which only belongs on the page. I’ve drawn my own inspiration from the old Setswana man, Ratsie Setlhako, an incredible poet, from whom I can draw a straight line to the Caribbean isle of Jamaica, to the person who is seen as the godfather of toasting, U Roy; from U Roy to the poet I Roy, and from there to hip-hop with Public Enemy, and draw it right back down there. That is why in my poetry seminars I use hip-hop music, reggae music, video clips – I use every single place I can think of where the word is alive. Wherever I can find it, I attempt to then reproduce that in the class. To make us, you know, move away from this ridiculous belief that the page is God – if it’s on the page then “oh wow, it’s holy”, but if it’s coming out of your mouth… doesn’t carry the same weight, especially coming from the fact that we live in a country that does not respect African languages. What I also attempt to do is to break the English language from within; have it speak, as they say, in the voices of the land.

In giving these little anecdotes, I’ve tried to show that the themes and the poetics with which I am involved, attempt to break away from the Shakespearean, from the Goethe-based, from the whatever. I celebrate Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonin Artaud who are essentially literary outlaws, who speak from the gutter, one could say, who speak from the street corner, who speak from the shebeen of which we’ve spoken, who speak in ways that are not jacket-and-tied up. That’s what I attempt, both to create in my own literature and to impart to whatever student might be interested.

Rampolokeng is a poet, playwright, novelist and filmmaker and a teacher in the MACW programme at Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

Teaching Creative Writing in African Languages

Sabata Mokae

I work for a university – Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley – that is not yet three years old. We are starting everything from the ground, literally everything. It is still being built physically, and so is the academic project, which includes the creative writing programme.

For a new creative writing programme, the question was: “Why do you want to teach creative writing when there are more than ten universities doing that in South Africa already?” I write in an African language and I believe we must grow creative writing in African languages, so I wanted to make that the foundation of the programme. Which led to other questions: “What do we do with African language writing? What are your concerns with it?”

I do have concerns. The biggest concern is about quality. Writing in an African language means that you have to read literature in that language. But publishers like to cut corners. Sometimes their proofreaders are people who speak the language but are not writing the language, or maybe not even reading it. They disregard issues like dialect. They expect somebody who speaks Setswana in Pretoria to proofread a piece written by Motswana in Thaba ‘Nchu. The other concern is exposure to feedback. Are people writing in African languages exposed to the same level of criticism of those who are writing English? Are they exposed to the same kind of training and education? The answers are: “no”, “no”, and “no”.

What do we do? Do we allow African language literature to die a natural death? Do we simply accept that it does not enter the mainstream? People who write in African languages largely write for the school-prescribed book market; that is not mainstream. I personally refuse to write books for schools. I know there’s big money there, but it works against mainstreaming African language writing. I’m happy to hear someone say they’ve got their last R200 and they’re going to buy my novel and read it. That’s the reader I want: not someone who reads it because if they don’t, they will fail an exam.

So we said to our new university leaders, “no, we are not going to allow writing in African languages to die, we’ve got to start somewhere”. That’s when we decided that we are going to introduce urban creative writing in African languages. But which African languages? We started by looking at where we are. Where we live, roughly 70% of the people speak Setswana.

So we chose Setswana. At the same time we said this is not where we are going to end, we need to think of other languages. We included the other African language spoken in the Northern Cape, which is isiXhosa. And then there’s Afrikaans. People think that Afrikaans is spoken largely by white people, but most of the people who speak Afrikaans are not white. Even black people speak Afrikaans when they are angry. It is very easy to express anger in Afrikaans, “I’m going to moer you!” So we decided on these three languages.

English as an international language is overrated. It does not even give you access to half the African continent, you know? Why can I not write in a language that is spoken by more than ten times the population of Iceland when I have a writer friend in Iceland who has 26 books written in Icelandic? My thinking is that if your book is good, it will get translated. It will get adapted. It will develop feet. It will move.

It’s not going to be an overnight thing. It’s like climbing a mountain, because multilingual as it is, South African literature is still very much generally English speaking, you know? My white friends don’t know how it feels to write in a language that’s not yours, that you don’t speak every day. I was born to parents who speak Setswana, I live in a community that speaks Setswana. The cops speak Setswana, the petrol attendants speak Setswana, the students at the university speak Setswana. There is absolutely no way that my English is going to be better than my Setswana. It is so unnecessary for someone like me to punish himself, to express himself in a second language, writing something as long as a novel, when I can do that in my mother tongue. I tasted freedom the day I wrote my first Setswana novel. I said, “Oh, so it feels like this, nê?”

Mokae writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction in English and Setswana. He is the author of the biography, The Story of Sol T Plaatje, and the head of the MACW programme at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley.

Trauma and Image

Mxolisi Nyezwa

In my teaching of writing I often draw on my early years of growing up in New Brighton, especially our country’s past and its divisive politics, how being born black in South Africa affected my childhood and my first awareness of poetry and its meaning in my life. I have learned that the doubts and the confusion of childhood are the green pastures of poetry, the only respite to the blackness of my soul. I believe everyone has a difficult story – it is an endless source. My role as a teacher is to encourage students to find theirs, and for poets that always means finding their own embedded images.

History and the Image

I am aware that my own birth was a fractional accident, a molecular happening. A squiggle of sperm met an ovum in the subway. A collision happened. A heedless man was born.

The horror of history is not found in the history textbooks. The horror is not in the stories that are written which we read with three eyes open, one eye guarding the fire, another sculpting the stars and counting the passing seconds. The horror lies in our minds. It is in the images that history has embedded in our minds. This truth was revealed to me by my task as a poet who looks for answers in his life, a poet who has nothing comforting to share with the world.

Thirty years ago, when my suffering was most acute, I became a prophet in my township of New Brighton. I had a more honest way of looking at the world, a poet’s vision of a skewed lamp and a convex glass lens. I didn’t know what was happening around me. All I knew were the fleeting images of dust and death, billowing smoke that spoke of burned bodies, angry bullets from the mercenary soldiers of the illegitimate government. I was a teenager and just starting to experiment with writing my poems, I was a broken ship, a soup ladle, a nubile soul.

I remember the day that I was invited to a poetry seminar at a university in Port Elizabeth. After the students’ quite penetrating comments I was also asked by the English poetry lecturer to respond. I mentioned that the gross and stark imagery of my poem referred to the Red Location, a corrugated and poor black area in Port Elizabeth, during the early 1970s.

The lecturer grew visibly upset. He remonstrated that poets are not really needed for input at his university as their comments are often misplaced and inappropriate to the scholastic requirements of the English class. The offending input was my reference to the bucket system which de-humanised black Africans for many years: to relieve themselves, black South Africans had to squat on a black bucket in communal toilets. These buckets were lined up in long torturous rows under stinging sunlight all over Red Location to be collected and emptied by the municipal workers, ooSovityo. These were the important and defiant images that I was thinking about when I wrote my poem which were now being contested and thrown out of court by the learned professor.

Teaching writing

Being a poet has taught me how to live with and survive the cruelty of childhood. I have discovered that poems that speak most profoundly for me, that I constantly use as crutches for support, are able to transcend the disturbing images that hold them together, and serve as water that quenches my thirst.

When I teach I use these and other stories to show students that what is already embedded in their minds is the source of all poetry. I do this by exercises that aim to evoke acute experiences in the students’ minds. These experiences can be of a pleasant or unpleasant nature. I am particularly attracted to pain as I think it ruffles the mind more, spiralling the student to the havoc of unanswered questions and dark feelings. This method of teaching writing by introducing to the student a negative stimulus is similar to taking an ice cream cone from a child. It is a shock treatment, introducing irritation and discomfort. The student is guided to focus on the drama of his elliptical emotions, channel the energetic outbursts into a poem to best contain the array of feelings, and yet keep them in an order. The sequencing of the poem’s words and stanzas doesn’t have to be in any logical semantic order, but the poem must still contain enough internal coherence and energy to survive the instability or disruption of its presence: the obvious loss of a map and a country for the poem.

The successful poems for me, as a teacher and as a poet, are the ones that will achieve the balance between the disturbing feeling of remembering a personal calamity, and the ability to remain calm and energised, remembering to breathe freely under water while holding your breath. True writing comes from our deaths, large and small.

Nyezwa is a poet with several volumes of poetry to his name and the editor of Kotaz, a multilingual South African journal. He lives in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, and teaches in the MACW programme at Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/grandmothers-teaching-a-view-from-south-africa/feed/08425Between: The state and Bhut’ Joe, the frequency and the futurehttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/between-the-state-and-bhut-joe-the-frequency-and-the-future/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/between-the-state-and-bhut-joe-the-frequency-and-the-future/#respondTue, 18 Apr 2017 09:31:05 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=8428

An exchange between Julie Nxadi and Asher Gamedze unravels the state of order, disorder and disarray in the realm of the militarised, polarised institutions otherwise known as South African universities, where imagination spells danger and nothing is given for now and the future.

I.

Me and Bhut’ Joe do not speak. He knows I like music and I know that he loves soccer. He remembers my birthday and I remember his daughter’s. He helps me hate my no-show father and I help him hate his cheating ex-wife. I have read his habits. He has watched me grow; I have watched him harden. I remember years when we were young at the same time. He knows that I am different; I know that we are the same.

We share a before.

Before I was a student and before he was law enforcement. Before he was sent by the state and I was sent by my state to throw and catch dignity. Before we had to fight each other for a place in the after. After kaffir. Before I knew there was an after.

After hunger and every feeling I was told is not real. After tears. After gas. Iya’u bonana ngomso Bhut’ Joe! After toe to toe with Bhut’ Joe. In a silent, violent fight for a place in the after. After erasure, nothing is given – the state of things has given no vision to its functionaries. Bra Joe, whose war are you waging? Who’s paying your wages? Whose future are you fighting for and will you still be their foot soldier?

In my vision I see you, and the rest of our street, policing our own street.

Nothing is given. Marx said communism is the movement to abolish the present state of things. Burningandbuilding, abolition, is a beautiful thing, but nothing is given.

Education has given us no future beyond a place in the present, the pitfalls are persistent and we the fighters are still trippin’ and fallin’ and grabbin’ each other by the Biko and Sobukwe shirts we’re wearin’ on the way down.

Whose war are we waging? Out there and in here. Whose future are we in? Now and then? Later we will learn this love thing; right now my fees are due and there’s no way I can pay. So. Must. Shut. Down.

Nothing is given: there are no absolutes, not even what has been is fixed. It is broken and it is still breaking. Us, as we solidify the things we don’t understand and unravel the rest. And is the future a time, place or state?

Prof So-and-so can’t wait for things to go back to normal. We can’t wait to see what their new normal looks like when we are still suffering the wounds of their old normal. Police to protect that from this. Police to protect this from itself. Police to protect that at all costs.

III.

Ey Julie, I’m tryna think through the question posed by the state: of things, of order, of disorder and disarray. Its apparatuses, ideology and repression. If the standardised state of living, for most, is disorder, how then do we wrap our heads round the repressive state role of the police in protecting and restoring order? And what and whose is state ideology? Young cadres, the vectors of history; Bra Joe taking pot shots; or Mbembe and the VC sipping tea? Achille’s heel has been exposed to be the comfy class position of the bourgeois academic justifying the state (of emergency?) of militarised normalcy, securitised peace. Call the state in, we can’t hear ourselves think. Restore order we’re falling into disarray.

Disorder is the state and disorder is mayhem while here we are sojourning inside the walls that sneer but don’t speak, here where knowledge is new words and how well you say them. Knowledge is there and not here. Learn the words, get out and get paid and please send us some money.

Student politics is new words and how well I say them. Since words and knowledges were never for us it doesn’t matter how I use them (what is harm when I don’t exist?). Let’s learn some slogans, get out and get shot.

Please send money for bail.

IV.

Asher, sometimes I just stand and stare at the buildings searching for a crack of remorse. I never find it. I touch the walls, willing them to apologise. They do not. I keep finding institutions where I thought I would find people. I keep looking. Bound to the ground by the wide questioning eyes of uNongqawuse. Not moving.

Shouldn’t they be at school studying, exercising the mind, cultivating their degrees of alienation from the reality of the circumstances, training and taming and incarcerating their imagination?

Is the police state (of affairs) dangerous to the body because it understands that if the mind is reduced to the body, the (d)anger of the imagination is neutralised and further, in an age where the so-called minds are unimaginative and stuck in the boring rationality of reason, maybe the body is the true site of future knowing?

It would be nice to unravel the state, of knowledge and capital, but damn, these cats are tight and also where is that fight supposed to take place? Caught up in the race for the university we forget sometimes that it’s not necessarily these old buildings and their persistent stench that we’re after: we’re tryna build a different space. Universe. City.

V.

Imagination spells danger and I’m in the mood for some radical study of the future beyond these walls.

VI.

I am afraid of saying “bodies” because that is all we have ever been. We do not even get to be the sum of all of our experiences, only the flesh that we occupy in the moments we are held in another’s gaze. And in those moments we must either scream or weep or rage or cower, we must do something… we must disappear or we must dominate. We ourselves dare not take the epistemic risk of privileging ourselves with opacity. We need everything in its place/race/gender/class/sexuality, forever heeding some standard or status quo. Always appealing.

I am afraid of saying “bodies” because the first barricade was not physical. The first barricade barred our history from the institution and damned us to being poor, black, hunched-over units in queues at the NFSAS office: no context needed. The first barricade made things of us. It barred our voices. It damned us to our bodies. Bodies that exist only when we look at them and then get suspended in some unknown frequency when we do not.

I am afraid of saying “bodies” without addressing the people who were banished from them.

Wena Julz, don’t you find it always interesting and somewhat dissonant how, in a world of persons, the bodies are outchea spitting the most truth by excavating space between reality and the myth? Like, if the body was the only thing we were then how come our words and thoughts are on fire?

Imagination spells danger.

VII.

The thick stench of red and white clothes burning – acrid, sour and choky. The billowing smoke follows the uninitiated around the fire, filling shallow lungs. Garments worn during thwasa must now burn. She must now graduate, enter the next phase of her journey. She is now a sangoma.

The throttling gasp of the lit tyre: alight, as the pent up centuries of angry smoke fill the perfect sky above the sanctified tower and dispossess privilege of its proximity to clean air. We are now here and we have taught the institution some of what we have brought. We have brought the fire and the continua and tonight we gonna be burning and aluta’ing.

A short history of colonialism is burning, looting and building and tonight we gonna burn the illusion that building is creative. What has been burnt and destroyed in the process of building towers? What has been locked out in the fortressing of knowing castles and (e)razed in their raising? These corridors smell bad, old and decrepit of ghosts, their bones and decay. Can we please light some mphepho in here.

This building is creative’s destruction, it is anti-imagination. We can’t think round here, with this university in the way. Perhaps the burning building provides the chance for something new or at least reminds us that we are, innit.

In unravelling the irresolvable, I am left thinking about fire and building the future… with love. And when uNongqawuse appeared (a young girl if not uGogo, a whisper of a frame if not a towering giant), and when she said “we must burn to build”, what if one people stood before her? What if in each pair of eyes fight spun around flight? What if burn and build stood back to back in their spirit’s seat and screamed with blood curdling coherence? What if I stand there with that people and know that we know that we want to build with fire and not get burned again? Wait, Asher… what if I didn’t know there was an option to not burn because I have loved and lived in the fire? What if they build on top of us? What if we must burn our way out?

uNongqawuse is here (uGogo if not a young girl. A towering giant if not a whisper) and she is holding our gaze.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

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